Making a giant interactive ballgame
Earlier this year we accepted quite a challenging project. The making of a Full HD interactive ball throwing game. This huge frame, with dimensions up to 3 meters wide and 1,2 meters high, had to be touch sensitive, stable, vandalism proof, have good contrast/brightness and be Full HD-capable… Oh yeah, and the job had to be done within a 3 week deadline. During summer it was present on every major music festival in Belgium, and about 500 people a day played this quite exciting game.
Here is a quick summary of the development of this challenging project;
First of all we ordered a special protective glass plate with a thickness of 2.5 cm. We had to make sure it was strong enough, so the balls wouldn’t break or damage the glass. The glass has a special anti-reflective coating to optimize the visibility of the projection.
The optical camera touchframe is applied to the front of the glass, but because the optical system is very fragile, we had to make sure the touchscreen camera’s and backlights are well protected from incoming fire.
In this picture we are mounting the Daylight rear projection film on the back of the glass.
In the meanwhile our Flash developers started designing and developing the game. Game development in Adobe Flash on a 1920px *1080px resolution is quite a challenge, a lot of time was spent optimising the graphics and video’s. Because there are so many video’s and animations being rendered at the same time, a quad core machine was used to run this game.
The video’s of the girl in the virtual bar, were shot in our in-house chroma key studio. She constantly interacts with the gamers, to make sure they won’t get bored. The beer and animations are all designed in 3D to give us the freedom of animation.
The combination of the Daylight rear projection film and a Barco full-HD projector gave awesome results. The contrasts are amazing, and are comparable to any lcd screen.
After finalising the Flash game and the screen’s construction, the final results look amazing.
Start throwing balls rockers !!!
Special thanks go to Proximus and ASP Blue Squares for their partnership in this project.
